We believe that the survival of this myth in the Western collective imagination is linked above all to two factors. On the one hand, it is a story that simultaneously evokes compassion and horror by confronting its recipients or readers with the realization that, behind the delicate order that culture has attempted to impose on the world, lurks an ineffable space where the ambivalences of chaos reign; on the other hand, the challenge to this order represented by the thematic cores of the legend establishes a web of successive acts of violence that provoke both fascination and horror: the uncontrollable passion for a foreign enemy, the betrayal of father and country, the dismemberment of a brother, and the annihilation of one's own offspring.
In general terms, the myth of Medea implicitly raises a reflection on man's relationship with violence and on the responsibility and freedo...read more
